SUO: Questions About SUO
Adam,
Thanks for weighing in on this issue. I'm inclined to agree with both you
and Bill Andersen. In the context of something like HPKB, it's quite true
that you can use a standard ontology to integrate several applications.
However, in the context of the Semantic Web, you're talking about
integrating web pages, not applications. Further, there are lots of web
pages and lots of web masters, which makes integration extremely difficult.
I'm not sure everyone who puts up a web site will care to put ontological
metadata in it. (As one of my colleagues recently commented, most of us
aren't interested in structuring their data for efficient and complex
retrieval. If we were, then databases would be ubiquitous.) Even if they
did "ontologize" their web pages, I'm not sure they would care to use a
standard ontology to do it. But they might care, if there were an
application that uses the standard ontology, and consistency with the
standard ontology was necessary to take advantage of the application. What
would such an application be?
Todd
> At 01:47 PM 5/21/2002 -0500, Bill Andersen wrote:
>> On 5/21/02 12:57, "Adam Pease" <apease@ks.teknowledge.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Todd,
>>> There are different opinions on this list. When we wrote the PAR for
>>> this group the intent was to have a standards effort aimed at ontology
>>> content - creating a set of terms and formal definitions. A large number
>>> of people who have joined this group are interested in a different
>>> direction however.
>>>
>>> Adam
>>
>> Hi, Adam...
>>
>> Well, I think the reason that the direction has diverged is *because* of
>> this text in the Statement of Purpose (which is equivalent to the PAR):
>>
>> 3) The SUO will play the role of a neutral interchange format whereby
>> owners of existing applications will be able to map existing data
>> elements just once to a common ontology. This provides a degree of
>> interoperability with other applications whose representations
>> conform to SUO. This entails the SUO being able to be mapped to
>> more restricted forms such as XML, database schema, or object
>> oriented schema.
>>
>> It seems to be recognized by many people who have chosen to join this group
>> that SUMO, OpenCyc or any similar effort will not achieve (3).
>
> That's an odd "recognition" since it flies in the face of at least
> anecdotal evidence to the contrary. We've used both Cyc and SUMO to
> integrate existing applications. The Cyc integration tasks are described in
>
> Cohen, P., Schrag, R., Jones, E., Pease, A., Lin, A., Starr, B., Gunning,
> D., and Burke, M. (1998), The DARPA High Performance Knowledge Bases
> Project, AI Magazine, Vol. 19 No.4, Winter.
>
> <http://projects.teknowledge.com/HPKB/Publications/AImag.pdf>
>
> One might claim there's a better, or more efficient way to accomplish this,
> but not that SUMO or Cyc can't successfully be used for this task.
>
>> Such people
>> participate out of a genuine interested in ontology. After all, this is
>> really the only place where one can do that - certainly not the W3C venues.
>> That explains the mystery of their presence.
>>
>> The reason you see them as going in a different direction is that they don't
>> agree with your approach. BTW, IFF for that matter doesn't agree with the
>> PAR. Should it be rejected out of hand as a candidate? I think not.
>
> I think you may misunderstand the IEEE then. IEEE charters groups to
> achieve their PARs. This is not just a discussion group. If someone has a
> project they believe in and want to make it into a standards effort, they
> should do so, possibly by chartering a new IEEE group with a new PAR. For
> example, Jim Schoening was already involved in P1484, but didn't try to
> push an ontology standard in that group since that wasn't the charter of
> the group. Instead, he started a new group. Mike Gruninger didn't try to
> standardize KIF in this group, he's submitted a new work item for ANSI.
> This isn't about my approach or anyone else's. It's simply about following
> a normal standards process.
>
> Adam
>
>
>> .bill
>
> Adam Pease
> Teknowledge
> (650) 424-0500 x571
>
----------
Todd Hughes, Ph.D.
Senior Member, Engineering Staff
Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories
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Camden, NJ 08102
P: 856.338.3979
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